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William Melchert-Dinkel leaves the Rice County Courthouse in Fairbault, Minn., holding hands with his wife on Feb. 17, 2011. Melchert-Dinkel was convicted Tuesday of assisting the suicide of an English man and attempting to assist in the suicide of a Canadian woman.Photo: Richard Sennott / Star Tribune / Files

An American man convicted in 2011 of posing as a young, depressed woman in an online “suicide chat room” and helping a Canadian teenager kill herself in 2008 has appealed the verdict to Minnesota’s top court, arguing this week that the free-speech provisions of the U.S. First Amendment should have protected his “supportive” conversations with the distraught Carleton University student.
William Melchert-Dinkel was a 45-year-old nurse at the time of 18-year-old Nadia Kajouji’s death five years ago in Ottawa’s Rideau River. The Brampton, Ont., woman had three online exchanges with Melchert-Dinkel — who passed himself off as a 31-year-old nurse named “Cami” — in which Kajouji discussed her depression and disclosed her plan to end her life.

During the typed Internet conversations, Melchert-Dinkel urged Kajouji to consider suicide by hanging rather than drowning — even describing the kind of rope she’d need and suggesting he guide her through the process via webcam — but the young woman is believed to have jumped from a bridge over the half-frozen river in March 2008. Her body was found downstream a month later.
In oral arguments Monday before a three-judge panel of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Melchert-Dinkel’s lawyer, Terry Watkins, pressed the state’s top justices to overturn his client’s conviction — as well as his sentence of one year in jail and a 15-year probation — based on what he insisted were unconstitutional restrictions on Melchert-Dinkel’s free-expression rights.
Melchert-Dinkel remains free pending the outcome of Monday’s appeal hearing, which can be viewed in full via the Minnesota Supreme Court website.
At issue is whether the state law under which Melchert-Dinkel was convicted — a statute that prohibits “advising, encouraging, or assisting” another person to commit suicide — is “overbroad” in its reach and thus in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s right to free speech, which protects even the most widely condemned opinions but can be overridden in exceptional circumstances involving, for example, defamation.
Watkins additionally argued that while Melchert-Dinkel had, in 2005, also discussed suicide with a chronically ill British man — 32-year-old Mark Drybrough — who later hanged himself, his client is even less culpable in the Canadian case because Kajouji had already made up her mind to take her life and ultimately ignored Melchert-Dinkel’s advice about hanging as the better method of suicide.
“Miss Kajouji explains in detail at the start of their three chats exactly how she’s going to commit suicide,” Watkins told the judges. “And although Mr. Melchert-Dinkel does try over and over again to explain the merits of hanging oneself and his offer to walk her through it, Miss Kajouji at no point changes or even considers doing anything other than what she first had said, and she goes through with that. So there’s virtually nothing in Miss Kajouji’s actions and that conversation that would suggest there was any assistance.”
Watkins acknowledged that Melchert-Dinkel’s “perverse obsession” with joining online chat groups to discuss suicide with distant but vulnerable individuals was far outside mainstream culture.
“We may not like the ideas. We may not want people to acquiesce to people to support suicide,” Watkins said. “But we do not have an obligation as a society to have a fixed perspective on any subject – and that includes suicide. Mr. Melchert-Dinkel is not required to be anti-suicide. He was not required to have a conversation where he was trying to talk her out of it. … He’s not required to call a hotline and give them her information. He’s not required to try to stop her from killing herself.
“We may not like his perspective,” he added. “We may not like the fact that there are, certainly, some very obviously morbid and creepy concepts in Mr. Melchert-Dinkel’s wanting to watch somebody hang themselves. But nonetheless, Mr. Melchert-Dinkel has a right to that perverse obsession.”
Watkins appeared to get some traction on the issue with the judges, who grilled the assistant Rice County attorney defending the conviction, Terence Swihart, on how Melchert-Dinkel could essentially be found guilty of inciting someone to a “lawless” action, as a lower court had ruled, when committing suicide is not against state law.
“What’s bothering me about your argument,” Chief Justice Lorie Skjerven Gildea told Swihart, is that “suicide is not illegal in Minnesota. So if we adopt your argument that encouraging someone to do something that is not illegal … is constitutional, then where does it end?
“I mean, people don’t like smoking. So now what? Now we’re going to pass a statute,” the judge asked, making it a criminal offence “if you encourage someone to smoke? …Help me understand how to draw the line.”
Swihart said that society has long understood governments have a particularly “compelling” reason to prevent suicides, and that the free-speech rights of the First Amendment shouldn’t be invoked to protect those who offer “encouragement” to troubled individuals to act on their suicidal thoughts.
“I think there’s a considerable distinction between suicide and smoking,” Swihart argued. “Over time, throughout the last 700 years at least, suicide has been considered a grievous wrong.”
But in his closing statement, Watkins argued that Melchert-Dinkel’s actions prior to Kajouji’s suicide don’t amount to “assistance” — which he said might involve handing someone a gun or a knife, and which is justifiably criminalized — nor even to “encouragement” or “advice,” which he insisted should be protected by the First Amendment.
Encouragement involves “trying to affect someone’s decision,” Watkins said, repeating his view that because Kajouji had already made up her mind, Melchert-Dinkel could not be held legally responsible for any crime in connection with her death.
“You’re trying to take them from point A to point B, and you’re trying to either go beyond support, going beyond mere comfort, and trying to alter their cognitive analysis of where they are – trying to push them over the brink into making a decision of suicide,” he said, explaining that it’s important to “split the hairs between assisting, advice and encouragement” to see that Melchert-Dinkel didn’t break any constitutionally justifiable law.
The judges are expected to make a ruling on the appeal by July, a Rice County lawyer working on the case told Postmedia News.
rboswell@postmedia.com